Published: April 20, 2008 08:17 am            

Kennedy: keep government, corporations apart to save environment, economy

OKLAHOMA CITY — Big corporations and government don’t mix, says Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy, an environmental lawyer, told a standing-room-only crowd at the University of Oklahoma’s Health Science Center that Americans are living in a “scientific nightmare” because corporations — such as those dumping toxins in public waterways — are running the American government.

“This is the revolving door plunder you get,” he said, “when you let corporations run a democracy.”

In his speech Kennedy blistered the Bush administration, large corporations, power companies, the poultry industry and the media.

“You can’t talk about the environment in any context,” he said, “without speaking critically of the Bush administration.”

As an example, Kennedy listed the heads of several federal agencies who were previously lobbyists for companies regulated by the same agencies.

“This is the worst environmental White House that we’ve ever had in American history,” he said. “They have put polluters in charge of virtually all the areas of government that are supposed to be protecting us from pollution.”

Kennedy also blasted the close ties between politicians and corporate interests.

“They treat the planet as if it was a business to be liquidated,” he said.

And Kennedy said many times those connections cause life-threatening problems.

“More than 640,000 babies in this country have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother’s wombs,” he said.

Speaking about Oklahoma, Kennedy praised the action of Attorney General Drew Edmondson and announced his support for Edmondson’s suit against large-scale poultry producers.

Those chicken producers, Kennedy said, are polluting the public’s waterways and “making themselves billionaires by poisoning the rest of us.”

He said the companies are “injuring the rest of us” by “dumping their crap into the Illinois River and the other rivers of the state.”

Protecting the environment, he said, isn’t for wildlife, but the country’s social and economic health.

“We’re not protecting the environment for the sake of fishes and the birds,” he said. “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.”

He said Americans should be frightened by the amount of pollution in the country’s waterways.

“About five years ago," he said, "the federal EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish caught in the state because of the mercury coming from those coal burning power plants.”

In 49 states, he said, “at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat from mercury contamination.”

“We’re living today in a science fiction nightmare when my children and most of the children in Oklahoma can no longer safely engage in a seminal primal activity of American youth: which is go fishing with their father at the local fishing hole then come and safely eat the fish. All because somebody gave money to a politician.”

In 100 percent of the situations, he said, good environmental policy is compatible with good economic policy.

“In a true free market you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and improving your community,” he said. “But what polluters do, they make themselves rich by making everyone else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. And they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter and I’ll show you a subsidy.”

The 54-year-old Kennedy is the son of former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, who was killed 40 years ago while campaigning for president.



M. Scott Carter writes for The Norman (Okla.) Transcript.

        

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